Wednesday we worked, Thursday we didn’t. (Friday we’ll work again).
Leo had heard me mention that I had picked up ingredients for pasta all’amatriciana, all of which keep, for an emergency dinner. He wanted it sooner, he said. Could I make it tonight? Okay, I said, I’ll just buy salad stuff today.
Off to the municipal market!
I observed the produce vendor for a few minutes and then took my little basket and selected a salad-sized lettuce, a carrot, three tiny cucumbers, an onion, a yellow tomato, two plums and a peach, a nectarine, and a melon. A few minutes in line and then my turn at the scale. Each item was weighed then put into little waxy-paper sacks, the tomato with the plums and the peach with the nectarines. I noticed that the berries were in tubs in a fridge behind the counter, to be asked for and not handled; so was a big tub of already-torn mixed salad greens to be doled out on request.
I wandered around the hall looking for perhaps a jar of mustard or some olives, remembering the pretty little marinated olives from the wine bar last night. I did find an olive counter but it didn’t take credit cards unless I paid enough for half a kilo. I found a sushi bar where you could buy little boxes of fresh sushi, like the grocery store ones at home, but made in front of you. I found a wine bar where people were drinking prosecco in flutes, across from the Italian meat vendor with his mortadella and salame. I found a vendor with a giant bin of potatoes and a smaller bin of sweet potatoes.
Potatoes next time, I decided. Fish and potatoes, with capers and lemon.
There was a grocery next door where I found mustard—I just got the store brand, trusting it would be pungent and adequate for salad dressing—and instead of olives, a jar of tapenade. I’d already bought a baguette when I went out for pastry and espresso earlier.
Meanwhile, Mark had taken Simon to the toy store. Simon is, at eleven, rather a collector and connoisseur of stuffed animals, and he had been promised one small “stuffie” from each of the two towns of our trip. He chose a soft brown rabbit with quilt scraps for a tail.
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We had had a minor electrical problem the evening before—the power had tripped, Mark had located and reset the breaker, but much later in the evening when the apartment got hot, we realized that the air conditioner hadn’t come back on. I composed a text to the property manager, in which I learned lots of new French words like the ones for “circuit breaker” and “to flip a switch” and “compressor.” She came over and showed me the controls and adjusted them. In fact we had a whole conversation about the split-system air conditioner operation, which of the two units outside might connect to which one inside, and how to determine if each was working, a comversation which Mark could only watch helplessly. Anyway, despite her telling me that the a/c wasn’t something she knew much about and saying she would contact the owner to send someone to look at it, whatever she did to the controls got it working again. It has been pleasantly chilly ever since.
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Leo had been planning our lunch all this time. He announced we were going to have sushi at a specific seaside restaurant to the west.
We walked through the city, taking notes about nearby pastry shops and wine bars, and especially a counter-service place that advertised tacos, “sandwishes,” bbq and tex-mex. “I’ve had so much Americanized Italian and Chinese food,” Leo said, “I want to try Frenchified American food!” But we pressed on to sushi.
I told Leo how to say “Nous sommes quatre” and sent him in to get a table. Simon was a little sulky—sushi’s not his favorite—so we promised him that if he didn’t manage to eat enough we’d find something else for him afterwards. He perked up, especially when we discovered they had those Japanese Ramune sodas on the menu, the kind sealed with a glass marble inside, and in his favorite flavor (fraise).
We studied the menu for about thirty seconds before Leo decided that we had to get the BIG SUSHI BOAT and it being immediately clear that this would simplify the ordering process, we agreed.
Simom liked the dragon figurehead, reached out and rotated it to face him. It was all very much like what we would have at home, and very good. Legitimately the best mackerel sashimi I’d ever had. Also rice and skewered meatballs and chicken and miso and cabbage salad.
The one unusual exception: cheese. One of the skewers was marinated beef wrapped around a mild white cheese, mozzarella-esque, and grilled till the cheese was all melted. It was yummy but not something I’d seen in a sushi restaurant before. Also, this restaurant sold salmon avocado poke bowls—with chunks of soft, washed-rind cheese wheel on top.
“Frenchified Japanese food has French cheese in it,” Leo observed.
Anyway, Simon was happy about the chicken meatballs and rice, so he also was fed and happy when we left.
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Mark took the boys to buy an inflatable ring toy (jouet flottant) which they filled for him with a compresseur (see, new vocab!) and then to the beach. I stayed in the apartment for some quiet alone time, and ran a couple loads of laundry, and texted with MJ to hear how the second week of college was going.
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Mark and I started dinner with some limoncello from one of the many lemon-products boutiques, and the tapenade and a little cheese, while my sauce gently cooked on the stovetop. When we ran out of limoncello we opened the Côtes de Provence I had been recommended at the wine store, and I made the vinaigrette for the salad with mustard and a spoonful of lavender honey, and plated it all up. The apartment dishes are these ridiculously large squares, but they actually work pretty well for plating.
We sat around and drank wine, then ran the dishwasher, then went out for ice cream and a walk in the very comfortable evening.
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